Abbey Ryan is a Philadelphia based painter, designer and illustrator who studied here in Pennsylvania as well as in New York and Massachusetts. She has a portfolio site, in which she showcases her illustration and design work, as well as her gallery art.

The latter is non-figurative, with arrangements of soft edged shapes that give impressions of movement and suggestions of morphing forms. They are arranged with a designer’s eye for the importance of negative space and rendered with a muted palette and delicate applications of texture.

Given my predilection for representational work, I find more interest in her painting blog, Ryan Studio, in which she has recently taken on the “painting-a-day” discipline, and paints crisp, painterly oils of simple subjects like fruit, vegetables, candy and other immediately available subjects that are often the chosen subjects for daily painters.

Ryan posts large images of her small paintings that are actually large enough to get a good feeling for the surface of the painting and the way the paint is applied, something I wish more artists would do when presenting their work online, both for the benefit of those just looking, and for the benefit of those looking to buy, who must make a judgement about the appeal of a painting from an online image.

Ryan’s strengths show when she arranges slightly more complex compositions and tackles textured and patterned surfaces in addition to her primary subject.

Ryan appears to be fairly young, and her willingness to take on the painting-a-day regimen, and her confidence in working with more complex elements within it, make me think it will be interesting to watch the course of her development as a painter.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Jason Waskey]